


Stolen Moments

by ms_prue



Category: Gentleman Bastard Sequence - Scott Lynch
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-16
Updated: 2014-07-16
Packaged: 2018-02-09 02:31:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,529
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1965591
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ms_prue/pseuds/ms_prue
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Sabetha takes what she wants, when she wants it, unless it happens to be taken from her first.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Stolen Hours

This was a good plan, Sabetha thought to herself as she watched the line of giggling young ladies turn and step in time to the ballroom march with their imaginary partners. Not that there had been anything wrong with her previous schemes since leaving Camorr a scant pair of years since. Her travels had eventually taken her to Lashain, and her time spent in that city's most fashionable circles had been most productive - the amount of rent she'd paid in advance on these well-kept, airy rooms in the mercantile district would attest to that - but she hadn't considered at the time that her very proper Lashani manners could be so fruitfully employed outside that expensive and unforgivingly stratified city.

True rank and wealth in Tal Verrar accepted nothing less than private tutors in all the arts, but there was opportunity aplenty to be had in the upper-middle ranks of the city's trading families. The proud merchant mothers and fathers, their sights set on greater things for their own children, were all too eager to throw their offspring and their gold into the arms of Madam Colorne, to be schooled at her respectable Merchant's Crescent address in the subtle niceties of dancing and manners, and acquire the social polish which they themselves lacked. Madam Colorne, Sabetha's latest creation, was reputed to be of modestly moneyed stock. Gossip had it that she had left her post as a private tutor to one of Lashain's finest families to care for her ailing mother, and upon that good lady's death, used her inheritance to establish her school of dance. Meanwhile, as her reputation and little school grew, Sabetha Belacoros, the carefully un-notorious Rose of Camorr, was well placed to overhear much of the island city's gossip and scandal from the lips of its youngest and least cautious citizens while quietly laundering her Lashani haul and waiting for an opening to secure her next fortune.

In accordance with the delicate sensibilities of their doting parents, Sabetha's debutantes were strictly segregated by gender. Later in the afternoon, after her girls had been collected by their sisters, chaperones and maids, her class of young men would begin to file in and tread the room with their own invisible dancing partners. She taught them well, if she said so herself, even though she could only hear about their successes in the ballroom second-hand. Madame Colorne, even had she been invited to the swell crushes that occupied her students, suffered from an unfortunate case of fictitiousness, and her creator's evenings were already heavily booked with a variety of covert chores. But Sabetha made no secret of her pride in the transformation of her gangly students into graceful creatures of sophistication and poise.

But there was something about the young men in particular that caught her attention, and her interest thus aroused, it produced a clandestine little affair completely apart from her larger scheme.

He never knew it, but her beau was chosen carefully for his circumstances and connections just as much as his pleasing enthusiasm and good looks. Even in a discreet, unremarkable little matter such as this, Sabetha took all possible precautions to ensure there were no unforeseen complications. She was rewarded for her planning and forethought with a few stolen hours over a handful of golden summer weeks, during which she and her handpicked young man had a very nice time.

The only thing she couldn't control, alas, were her young lover's fancies.

"I should give you diamonds and jewels," he whispered to her one afternoon, as they lay in a pool of sunshine on the day bed in the school's little store room, lately converted to a makeshift boudoir. "When I turn twenty next month I can draw on my own funds. I'll get you a proper house, with a fine bed and a huge fireplace, and we can stay there together all day."

She scoffed at this extravagant pronouncement and reached for her wine glass, which sat next to his on the tiny window sill. He was quite a good partner, willing to learn and eager to please. She had no doubt a long career in passionate love affairs lay ahead of him, with plenty of opportunities to make many people very happy.

"Little tiger, she said, drinking in the sight of his taut, golden body in between sips of wine. "What a pretty picture you paint. But you're sadly mistaken. I don't want your house and your jewels." She replaced her glass on the sill and pulled him close, chest to chest, and linked her hands with his, holding his arms up in an erotic parody of the classic First Position common to so many waltzes, marches and gavottes. "I'm just your humble dancing mistress," she whispered, raising gooseflesh where her breath touched his neck, "and these are only dancing lessons."


	2. Stolen Evening

The cuisine of the Marrows was uniformly terrible, but despite its people's commitment to crimes against flavour, mostly inflicted through the medium of cabbage, the kingdom of Emberlaine held some interesting advantages for the professional false-facer. Unlike the cynical folk of the Theran cities who were difficult to fool at the best of times, the serious Vadran people of the north, perversely, were less likely to demand explanations of any unusual strangers who crossed their paths.

Upon deciding for sundry uninteresting reasons to lie low in the countryside for a time, Sabetha resolved to both challenge herself and stave off boredom by taking on the persona of an educated, literate, middle-aged woman with a fine accent completely at odds with her empty purse and swordless baldric. Her new character was thoroughly implausible, but in the eyes of her Vadran beholders, the explanation for both her outlandishness and unexpected presence in their town practically wrote itself.

Local gossip had it that this ageing former-bladeswoman had been anything from the disgraced daughter of an Ancestral family to a decorated garrison commander, and out of Sabetha’s hearing she knew the debate ran high and loud. She was very careful not to make any references to the past nor tell any anecdote that might be traced to a specific time and location. For one thing, inventing her own version of the story would be wasted effort; nothing she could produce would ever be as good as the stories they made up for themselves. 

And indeed, in all politeness, nobody would dare to ask about or even mention her fall from good society. Everyone knew that just as Marrows custom allowed a person to climb the Red Ladder up the rungs of respectability, so too could a person descend it, or rather, be forced to start it over again from the very humblest beginning. Finding yourself on the wrong side of a noble family, or guilty of a capital crime meant either death or a year and a day of indentured servitude to the offended party, and nothing but the clothes on your back and the right to be called a free citizen once more when that time was up. But no matter how loudly and how long they disagreed on the most likely tale behind the strange woman's arrival in town, everyone agreed it was no wonder she had chosen to travel and leave behind her past life, and all those who had known her before.

Ageing herself thirty years and carrying herself like a former soldier was a lot of effort at first, but it grew easier with practice. In the daylight hours that punctuated her sessions of heavy drinking, Sabetha cemented her "fallen woman of consequence" act by offering lessons in fencing arts more suited to a private salon in an affluent city than the courtyard of a dirty tavern in a town scarcely better than an oversized trading post. Although the skills she offered to teach were laughably useless to folk who would never wield a bladed weapon other than an axe or spear, she was faintly surprised to find herself with paying students, enough to cover her dirty room and board at the tavern and keep her cup full of cheap wine at night. Those who came merely to rubberneck were disappointed, though, because she never made any small talk nor dropped even the smallest hint of her life before. Once they realised her lips were firmly sealed on personal matters, those students quickly lost interest. Eventually even the tavern regulars abandoned their evening game of getting her very drunk in the hope that she would talk about herself. For one thing, she needed no encouragement to drunkenness, and for another, her loosened tongue strayed more to argument than personal reflection, and to a Vadran audience a proper debate was just as good, if not better than a history. Tavern gossip eventually returned to its normal mainstays of local news and speculation. Sabetha drank it all in with her wine, and began to form a scheme.

Despite the fact that every proper long blade in the town was kept under lock and key in the communal armoury, with harsh penalties for any ordinary citizens found carrying an edged weapon outside of wartime, a handful of her students seemed to discover a genuine passion for the arts of the sword and regularly came back to the tavern courtyard for more instruction in its use. Even more unexpectedly, one or two of her novices were actually worth teaching.

It had not occurred to her that while she inhabited this strange, useless, drunken old woman that she might actually attract a suitor. In fact, she'd picked the disguise to avoid romantic approaches. But one young man, undeterred by her age and stubborn, almost haughty uselessness, continued to come to her for sparring practice. He took to the drills with the ridiculous wooden practice swords with genuine enthusiasm and showed a surprising aptitude for it, more than any of his fellow students. Before long he became a most satisfying sparring partner and had improved so much that she no longer had to hold back for him. She could still beat him, easily, with one hand tied behind her back if she had to, but it took some concentration and cunning. It had been so long since she'd had a competent partner and the opportunity to spar to her heart's content, and she had missed it.

However, while it would have been lovely to take this eager, agile young man out of the practice court and up to her bed, she had painted herself into a corner. Her middle-aged façade simply could not stand up to the kind of scrutiny she would demand of a lover. But their closeness had kindled a need in her, reignited a spark of longing she had never been able to fully smother. She missed having a lover, and the feeling gnawed at her until she finally gave in and made a plan to bed her diligent student-in-arms anyway.

Several days before the celebrations planned for the mayor's daughter’s wedding, Sabetha's drunken, useless old soldier retired from town, bidding farewell to her debating partners in the tavern's common room. The night of that wedding, after securing for herself the most portable portion of the mayor's daughter's substantial dowry, she made her way back to the dirty old tavern. Her former student would be among the crowd there tonight, toasting the happy couple with drinks also paid for from the mayoral coffers. It was a stupid risk to approach him after they had spent so long together already, matching wits and arms on the practice court, so she took all possible care not to be recognised while still ensuring she catch his eye. That was why she was false-facing as a farmer’s daughter, young and eager to take advantage of the festivities in town to have some fun of her own.

He was... adequate. Nothing more, nothing less. From her new perspective there was nothing especially remarkable about him. She'd seen better muscles on honest farm labourers on her way back into town. His jokes were middling, his command of the tavern crowd's attention was poor, he had, she knew, no particular talents in trade or artifice. He had made a reasonably good practice partner for their mock battles with pretend swords. But there was no spark, no playful sparring between him and this farm girl. Sabetha realised with a pang of heartache that the only truly interesting thing about him had been that he had wanted her when she was deliberately trying to be unwanted.


	3. Stolen Happiness

Disguised in their counterfeit blue uniforms of the Karthani city watch, the three Gentleman Bastards slipped away from the aftermath of election night and reached Sabetha's safe house at the Court of Dust without further incident. The house was a modestly sized dwelling, sparsely furnished, but the provisions were of the finest quality; fresh linen, a selection of clothes, wine in the cellar and books on the shelf. After they had toasted to their reunion, Jean found himself a novel, settled back in his chair, and resolutely pointed them up the stairs.

"Go," he insisted. "I'll sit down here and keep an eye on things and be happy for you."

Locke hesitated a moment, still uncertain, while Sabetha reached out to squeeze Jean's hand in thanks.

"I'm happy for all of us," Jean amended. "Now get out of here before I see something that disturbs me."

So they did.

It was awkward at first, one of them clumsy and both of them a little unsure.

"Should I put my blue jacket back on?" Sabetha laughed. "Maybe it will be easier if you pretend you're fucking with the Watch?"

Locke didn't reply, except to cover her mouth with his own, making those the last coherent words she spoke for quite some time.

It would always be different with Locke than with any of her other lovers. Not just because he knew her as well as anyone could, but because she wanted him despite it. Take her hair, for example. Even on the rare occasion such as this, when she wore her natural shade, with no mismatched roots to worry about, it had become second nature to deflect any attention toward her hair to other places of equal or greater interest to her paramour.

You can't hate it, Chains had told her all those years ago when she had first arrived at the Temple of Perelandro, a tiny little Shades Hill sneak thief hiding her anxiety under a thick layer of rage. Your hair isn't dangerous; the danger is those morons who think it's their payday. By all means, be angry at them, and don't ever hesitate to stick that dagger you carry in a slaver's gut. But you have to give up being angry at yourself. When you're false-facing, people will want to see your hair, touch it, even dress it for you, and if you don't let them, they will start to wonder why. Squeamishness is a bad habit that will get you killed long after the slavers lose interest. Do you understand?

It wasn't fear that drove her to avoid scrutiny, she'd tried to tell herself, she just couldn't take the risk. Not when it was so easily avoided. There were so many innocuous, simple excuses that she'd never had to give the same one twice. No, stop that, you'll just mess it up, and, Let me, I don't want to lose any pins, or, You can only undo it on the condition you put it back up again, just as it was.

And then there was Locke. Preva help her, it was like something out of one of Jean's tragic romances. The gods had seen fit to give her one perfect lover, constant in his feelings for her, deeply passionate in her bed, a match for her intellect and wit. Their time together was a sacred, safe place where she could let all her layers of checks and doubts and survival strategies slip, and leave herself exposed and able, for once, to do whatever she felt like. Locke loved her without reservation. And he also loved her hair.

He waited for her little nod, his permission to approach, and reached up to undo her pins. One by one he deftly extracted the tiny slips of enamelled metal and laid them neatly on the plain dresser that lay easily within arm’s reach of the huge, luxurious bed that almost filled the room. Unbound, it spilled over her shoulders, and she could see it there, falling over her breast, catching the candle-light and scattering it. It was red like a wound, an injury she couldn't acknowledge, that never healed no matter how much time passed.

Locke gathered the strands up and pulled them out of her sight, behind her neck. Leaning in to her, he draw his mouth up, up from her collarbone, trailing kisses underneath her earlobe, past the weak spot she'd used to entrap him with her perfume weeks ago, and traced the line of her jaw until there was no more distance between his lips and hers.

It was unfair, so unfair that she could feel the difference between her body's reaction to this skinny little idiot and all her other lovers. She'd tried her best to rediscover this unnameable sensation with others since Locke - both the rich and otherwise completely uninteresting bachelors she'd bedded for practical reasons, and the others she'd taken out of raw loneliness and longing. And yet she felt it again now, with him, all these years later and all that time spent apart. It hadn’t just been her imagination, or an artefact of the excitement they’d felt while they were making up their own lessons together in sex and seduction.

There in that room with Locke, drifting in and out of sleep while they lay tangled in each other's arms, Sabetha felt a sense of true freedom for the first time since she'd left Camorr. She saw him, the better Locke, the generous, thoughtful, loving man that haunted the body of her conniving, vain and reckless oath-brother, and knew that the better Locke had seen her, too. Perhaps she had her own better self, also, one that didn't need to enforce a buffer zone of distance with cutting remarks. A Sabetha who accepted she could let things be simple, and love who she loved.

To catch sight of one another, to reclaim those better selves despite all the time that had passed and the distances they'd travelled; it was wonderful. It was agony. And it was utterly, completely useless. Because there, standing next to the mirrored dresser, was Patience.

Sabetha’s happiness evaporated in an instant. Every instinct screamed that she should get out, flee, but she was quite unable to move, pinned in place by the bondsmage's art.

"What now?" Sabetha growled, finding her voice.

"I have something to show you," said Patience, indicating toward a cloth-draped shape. She pulled the cover aside to reveal a portrait. A red-headed woman and her smiling lover, the black sleeve of his robe falling away just enough to reveal the tattoos of rank etched onto his wrist; Patience's evidence of the story she'd spun about Locke's origins and the source of his depth of feeling for Sabetha.

"I'm flattered, really," Sabetha spat, "that you spare the time for interfering in my affairs, when you must have so much meddling of your own to be getting on with."

"My work tonight is almost done," replied Patience. "But this... I thought you should know."

Red hair wasn't the danger. Locke could be the reincarnation of a two-headed Eldren-killing monster for all she knew, and he wasn't a threat to her either. No, the real danger stood next to the painting, twitching the grey cloth back into place ready for the next reveal in her vindictive little game. The portrait was just Patience's attempt at misdirection, and Sabetha knew she couldn't afford to show she saw right through it.

"Let me up, please," said Sabetha, immediately regretting the courtesy inherent in her phrasing and vowing to undo it as soon as possible. "I need to get my things and get out of this gods-forsaken shithole."

"You're making the right decision."

"I always make the right decision." She gathered up her hairpins and jammed them angrily into place before pulling on her clothes and boots. From a trunk under the bed she took a rough, dark coloured travelling cloak and satchel. Briefly she considered leaving a note, but what could she possibly say to Locke or Jean that she could risk being read or misused by the bondsmage?

They'd been apart before. The world hadn't ended. Hells, despite his best attempts, Locke hadn't even managed to get himself killed.

She set off down the stairs, praying silently to the Nameless Thirteenth for his protection and blessing for her Bastard brothers as she passed Jean, asleep in the armchair where they'd left him, his book and his hatchets resting on his lap.

"Go well, Sabetha Belacoros," Patience whispered in Sabetha's ear as she slipped out the city.

"Go fuck yourself," Sabetha wanted to say, but didn't. She felt confident Patience would hear it from Locke soon enough.


End file.
